Red Sea 130D AIO

[trio91]

Hey guys, so back in February, i set up a new tank. I only posted this on my local reefer's club site and just wanted to share this.....


so, its been a long time coming, but I am finally ready to take down my old tank (72gal bow) and set up a new tank (smaller tank) in my living room. The 72 gal bow front wasn't working for me as it was in my basement and pretty much an outta sight, outta mind type of deal. When we held a club meeting here in February of this year, a fellow club member (NJRC) told me that she had a spare tank that was sitting in her basement and that If I wanted, I was more than welcome to have it. long story short, I finally got around to picking it up about 2 weeks ago and here it is, the red sea D 130L or 34gal AIO.

here is what it should look like when its all said and done

here is a photo of the actual tank in my living room, before I gave it a good cleaning with some water, vinegar and razor blade.

and after

 

[trio91]

now that she's been all shined up, now it was time to give this thing a "once over". Now back tracking a little bit, to my surprise, I never really knew that red sea had an AIO line that resembled a bio cube. so after doing a little more research on it, I came to realize that RS has discontinued this item (which is probably why I never heard of it) I am mentioning this because after my "once over" on this beast of a tank, I came to realize that at 1st glance, this was a pretty much built to be a plug n play type thing and aside from a few things being a bit dated, it was well thought out by RS

the 1st thing I noticed was the power hub. what they did was essentially notch out a section of the glass tank to house a discreet power strip with all your plugs to go into

as you can see they also label each plug for you so that you know what controls what. so basically you plug all your items into this canceled strip and then plug the strip into the outlet, no messy cords and very simply done.

 

[trio91]

now, with this fancy plug/hub thing going here, my attention is now drawn to the main plug itself. apparently a previous owner had removed the ground plug, either that or it broke off somehow but in case it made me kinda nervous (given that lights, pumps, skimmer, fan, timer and everything else will be powered by it.

so I decided to replace the old plug with a new one

broke out the tools

and just went at it. I just snipped off the old cord. wired the new plug with a new ground and voila, instant plug.

 

[trio91]

the next thing I wanted to address was the equipment itself. 1st the pumps. to my surprise, this AIO tank, originally came with 2 return pumps which are supposed to be mounted in same chamber, side by side to fit into the 2 holes.

here is where they are intended to go

 

[trio91]

at 1st i didn't get it, but after find a red sea 130d clip on youtube, the vision made sense

here is the pic of the original pumps that should be slotted in #9

one was damaged and the other should be installed like this with the nozzle

 

[trio91]

so when my fellow club member gave me this tank, she also gave me a bag of goodies with it. in this bag in particular, there were 2 pump upgrade kits. assuming, I am not the only person who had a big question mark on his head when he saw the 2 pump thing, RS offered upgrade kits to the D series. in this kit was a much larger pump, hose, a larger output nozzle and a plug.

 

[trio91]

so, with the one damaged pump, I decided to install 1 upgraded pump with the new fix-ins.

now as you can see from the 3rd pic there is absolutely no wiggle room for this pump in that chamber. my biggest concern is that the pump may rattle against the glass and either break it or just make a noise that will drive me insane. once it's filled up with water, I'll know for sure, I can have smaller pumps lying around that I can swap out if I need to + the old stock pump. *

*what i wound up doing is wrapping black,coarse filter foam around it and zip tied the thing.....problem solved

 

[trio91]

now the skimmer, pretty straight forward on this. it just has an awkward design. if you saw the video in the earlier post, you'll see that it has almost a 45' angle on it which turn, takes up a ton of valuable real-estate in that rear chamber.

its impossible to clean given its shape so I did what I could, I plugged the pump in, it turned on and that's that for now. if I don't like the skimmer, I may look into maybe one of those ghost skimmers (I dunno) *

*i did eventually swap this skimmer out which you will see in later posts

 

[thelawnwranglers]

lol take out soup containers are a staple of my fish storage stuff too

 

[trio91]

now to the problem, the lights

when I plugged in the lights, the fixture was making this horrible sound, almost like a stuck motor. so I decided to open up the hood and see what's inside. I think I have narrowed it down 2 one of 2 things. either the ballast or the fans. (this unit has 3 cooling fans in total that come stock, one to cool the water {which I haven't even gotten to yet} and apparently 2 for the compact, t5 light fixture incased in the hood.

I had to remove these tabs to get under the hood. which is were I discovered these 2 hidden fans

there is also a light timer tied into this system. with all this stuff going on under the hood being pretty shot, and after consulting with some fellow club members, i decided to gut the hood and replace the light

 

[trio91]

lol take out soup containers are a staple of my fish storage stuff too

i use those things for everything...

 

[trio91]

fully gutted

 

[trio91]

being that this will be my 1st above ground display tank, (for years my tanks have been in the basement) I wanted this to look as sharp as possible so i need to cut a hole in the top in order to mount the puck into the hood. i have some kessils from my old tank and an a360we should fit nice on this tank....with some mods*

*on a side note, before i cut into this hood to install the led light, i did some research on replacing the entire hood. RS reached out to me and said that they do carry that hood and to replace it with: stock hood, t5 light fixture (with everything in it) as well as the fans would be $225.00 <- assuming that's minus the tax + shipping.

 

[trio91]

I finally decided to mount my light fixture on the hood. after taking the advice from my esteemed colleagues from my local reefers club, I decided to mount my kessil A360we onto this hood.

for the most part the process was very straight forward. 1st I traced around the light fixture with some white chalk, drilled a pilot hole with my step bit, then just cut outwards towards the edge of my circle with my jig saw.

 

[trio91]

I didn't take a pic of my cutting with my jig, but fast forwarding the last pic is a top shot with the hole cut out

 

[trio91]

with the hard part done, I now needed to figure out how to suspend this puck. so, what I did was just leave on the plastic light cover that mounts tank-side, and just dropped it in

 

[trio91]

so now I needed some electrical work done by a licensed electrician. where the tank was originally positioned in the previous photos was on the other side of the living not too far from the front door. the biggest issue I had with that was that the tank would get a daily direct blast of sunlight from the front door into the tank (which I know would give me algae issues day 1) so in short I decided to move it to the other side.

I had to run a dedicated line for the tank to its new position, the outlet that was there housing our living room light had 4 wires going into it which told me that it was feeding off something. which would be bad given I am planning to run a bunch of stuff to this outlet. it looked like this

so i contacted a service guy and he did just that, run a dedicated "fish line"

 

[kschweer]

Good to see your build over here Marcus!

 

[trio91]

so at this point, i was really hating this skimmer and decided to upgrade it for this tank. i did some more research and found that the tunze 9002 skimmer was a perfect match with this that would allow me to also have the media basket in the rear. Well it turned out that this particular skimmer has been been discontinued (along with this tank) so what i ended up buying was the Tunze Comline DOC Protein Skimmer 9001.

now i know this is a small skimmer but:

the rear chamber is deep but it is not wide. the T-9002 was about 2.1'w and total width of the rear chamber is a little less than 3". The T-9004 which is rated for 65gal measures in at 3.5'w. So my alternative was to go with the 9001 which should fit snugly in at 2.5" w (it's rated for up to 37gal) ....so we'll see what happens, the reviews seemed pretty good on this skimmer

 

[trio91]

Good to see your build over here Marcus!

yea i know, i have been meaning to do so for some time now, ive seen you and @redfishbluefish do it so i figured id just tag along